In those days, when any theme was too darkly disreputable or indelicate for discussion--and a few things still were, in that ante-white-slave era--people were prone to refer to such doubtful topics as "shrouded in mystery," and to let it go at that. There was more than one event in the cradle-to-grave career of Madame Jumel that called for and received the kindly mystery shroud. As far as coherence will allow, let us leave the shroud snugly tucked around those events. I mention it, at the outset, only because more than one chronicler has used it to account for hiati--(or is it hiatuses? The former sounds more cultured, somehow--) in the lady's career. Whereas, nearly all, if not quite all, these gaps can be bridged quite easily by well-authenticated facts. Some of them too well authenticated for complete comfort. And so to the story. Aboard a ship bound north from the West Indies, one day in 1769, a woman died, a few hours after the birth of her baby daughter. It was not necessary to remove any wedding ring from the dead mother's finger before burying her at sea. One story says that her orphaned daughter's father had been a French sailor named Capet. Another and wholly diverse tale says that the baby was not born at sea at all, but in the Providence, Rhode Island, poorhouse, and of unknown parentage. You see the shroud of mystery was pressed into service very early in the biography. In any event, soon after the ship touched at Providence, a Rhode Island tradesman's wife was so attracted by the prettiness of the solitary girl baby as to adopt her. At the subsequent christening, the rather uninspiring name of Eliza Bowen was bestowed on the child. No one seems to know why. More mystery, and not a particularly thrilling one at that. In strait-laced ways and to all demure modesty, Eliza was reared. And at fifteen she was not only the prettiest girl in Rhode Island, but one of the cleverest and--so declared the pious--one of the very worst. In those days and in New England, it was delightfully easy to acquire a reputation for wickedness by merely failing to conform to all the ideas of the blue-law devotees. Shan't we give Betty Bowen--her commonly used name--the benefit of the doubt? We know she was not only blessed with unwonted beauty, but with an exceptional mind. She had, in full measure, even in girlhood, the nameless and irresistible charm of the super-woman. She was reckless, high of spirit, impatient of restraint; inclined to listen over-kindly, perhaps, to the pleadings of her countless rural admirers. Then, when she was only seventeen, Colonel Peter Croix came into her life. Croix was a former officer in the British army and lived in New York. He had plenty of money, and was more or less what, a century later, would have been called a "rounder."